Abstract:

Waiting for services is a curse, more so in the hospital.  Yet often we find patients waiting in so many areas in the hospital, starting from OPD, Pharmacy, diagnostics, admission/discharge, OT etc.  Simple in-house user friendly IT solutions were made for most important 5 areas of services of maximum waiting.  In the OPD, crowding was totally eliminated by beaming the room number and the token number in a large size screen just by click of a button by the consultant.  Access to scanned outpatient records to the physician resulted in total elimination of time for retrieval of records which otherwise used to take on an average 40 minutes.  This also resulted in substantial cost saving and reduced misfiling and loss of records.  In operation theatre, dynamic display of information regarding the patient flow inside the theatre has totally eliminated the patient relative’s apprehension.  Undue waiting for discharge process is a universal phenomenon and the bottleneck is mainly in discharge summary preparations.  Online summary preparations and verification at multiple level, reduced the discharge time significantly. Crowding for discharge bill payment was eliminated by providing a token number and messaging them on completion of the billing and insurance formalities.  In conclusion, areas where we witness maximum crowding, implementation of simple, user friendly problems driven solutions helped in improving the patient satisfaction.